Conversations with Curators takes place Wednesday (Feb.14) at 4 p.m., with Stewart Plein, Rare Books Curator, in conjunction with her display cases exhibit around books from the Harlem Renaissance, DCL Lobby on Anne Spencer, West Virginia poet.
Spencer, Harlem Renaissance poet, civil rights activist, teacher, librarian, and gardener, lived a life of dualities. Born into the old state of Virginia she lived her formative years in the new state of West Virginia. She experienced her life as a young adult during the great industrialization of Bramwell, a coal and railroad boom town, and her married life in Lynchburg, Virginia, a city with a traditional economy. While she sought solitude and respite from the world around her, she was also a proponent for civil rights activism. Throughout her life, Spencer slipped between the borders of Virginia and West Virginia, one Virginia nurturing her in youth, giving her the time to dream dreams; the place where poems and a love of the natural world began. The other Virginia was to become her platform, the place where her poems flourished, where she followed a personal call to activism and where she nurtured her garden as a refuge from the outer world. The circumstances of her life in Bramwell were to become the foundation of her extraordinary life in Lynchburg.